Because silence has a texture when you're used to it being full. He'd been working for an hour when Lily appeared.
She came out with her homework and sat on the back step, which had become over the past 3 days a thing she simply did. like it was established. Like Daniel working in the yard and Lily doing homework nearby was a pattern that had always existed.
"Mom's on a call," Lily said.
"She's been on it since 6:00." The shareholder vote probably.
Lily opened her notebook. She's been up since 4:30.
I heard her pacing. Daniel kept working.
She's fighting for something she built, he said. "That takes everything."
Did you ever fight for something like that? He considered it honestly.
"My wife's medical bills," he said. After she died, the insurance company tried to deny 3 months of her treatment costs.
Said it was experimental. He paused.
It wasn't experimental. It was just expensive.
There's a difference. Lily looked up from her notebook.
I filed every form. I appealed every denial.
I made calls every day for 4 months while raising a 5-year-old alone. He checked the tension on the mesh.
They paid it eventually. "Did it help?"
Lily asked. "Winning?
I mean, did it make anything better?" He thought about that for a moment.
He really thought about it. "Did it make it fair?" he said., "Better and fair aren't always the same thing, but fair still matters."
Lily wrote something in her notebook. He had the feeling she wasn't writing homework.
"My dad's attorney sent a second email," she said very casually, not looking up. Daniel went still.
"I know because mom left her laptop open, Lily said. I wasn't snooping.
It was just there." A pause.
"He's petitioning for primary custody."
"Temporary," he says.
"During the period of mom's professional instability." She said the last two words the way a 12-year-old says adult words that taste wrong in her mouth.
That's me. I'm the period of instability.
Daniel set down the pliers. He turned and looked at Lily fully.
You are not the period of instability, he said. I know that.
Her voice was careful. But he's going to stand in front of a judge and say that my mother losing her company makes her less capable of taking care of me.
A pause. And maybe a judge believes that.